| Regular meetings between the CRCS counselor and the client allow for assessing clients’ changing needs, monitoring progress on goals and action steps, and revising the prevention plan as needed. In essence, once the initial assessment is completed, every session with your clients includes some monitoring of progress and reassessing of the prevention plan.
A. Ongoing engagement and contact
You should continually encourage your clients’ active participation and engagement in CRCS and attempt to address the most pressing risk reduction needs at that time. By addressing these critical risk reduction needs, clients will be more engaged in the process. In addition, retention in CRCS is linked to having a strong connection between client and counselor, so counselors should work on engagement and connection with clients during every session.
In addition to regular sessions with clients, you will want to maintain contact with your clients for various reasons–
- To remind clients of appointments
- To check on why a client missed an appointment
- To let clients know that you want to keep up with what is going in their lives.
B. Documenting contact
Remember to document contact: The date, time, how the contact was made – phone, email, personal visit – and the result or outcomes of the contact. This documentation will demonstrate your efforts to keep in touch with and provide services to your clients.
| A sample template for client contact tracking is included in
Appendix C. |
C. Additional topics to document for monitoring progress -
Remember that you will want to keep active case notes for each client, in which you should record the following types of information.
- Review prevention plan – goals, objectives, and action steps – from previous session. Do the objectives still make sense?
- What did and did not work? And why? For example, if a client’s objective was to have used a condom with their sex partner at least once by February 11, 2006, and they did not, you need to determine why, what were the barriers or problems, and develop strategies to solve the problem or develop objectives that are more realistic.
- Is the client ready to continue with the plan?
- Would it help the client to keep a ‘diary’ of their risk reduction efforts?
- What are the costs and benefits of changing the behavior?
- Do you and your client need to brainstorm some new action steps?
- Are there some areas where skills development would assist your client to accomplish objectives?
- Does your client need referrals to take care of other issues?
- Make the next appointment.
- Document the session!
D. Periodic follow-up assessments of risk behaviors and factors affecting risk
In addition to documenting the content of each session, you and your client will need periodically to take a ‘snapshot’ or review of risk issues and progress in addressing them.
Remember that, for some individuals, some types of risk behavior occur only sporadically, depending on the triggers for their risk and how well the clients can cope with the situations that lead to risk. If you are using a 90-day recall period, it makes sense to do a follow-up assessment every 3 months or so. For PEMS reporting, you are only required to report the results of the final follow-up or one that occurs closest to discharge.
| A sample follow-up assessment template is included in
Appendix I. |
Go to section 2 part 7 |
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Link to a PDF document
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Link to non-CDC Web site
